The Lukewarm War
by Lord Ficmungus
Summary: Schwarzesmarken stuff.
1. Beatrix Beyond

" _Ich kümmern sich nicht wo oder wie, finde mich ein Steuereinheit."_

* * *

The flight of the Verteidiger had brought victory for the West German allies. Its defenses made it nearly invulnerable to every strain of BETA. Its weapons decimated everything in its path. It even managed to take out a few East German units when they tried to feebly impose themselves in the middle of the crossfire.

If only Johanna could find the same peace of mind as the other pilots in her convoy.

She was a casualty of an alien-infested world. A sickly child since birth, Jo had been taken in as a ward of the state after the BETA invaded her town and massacred all of her known family. With no other outlet for her misery, she had grown up playing simulators, fighting in pretend battles against the BETA, imagining herself as one of the brave TSF pilots she adored, always clinging to the smallest hint of hope and normalcy.

After spending her entire childhood as a lonely cripple, her country had blessed her with a chance for a better life. The procedure had replaced over 40% of her frail body with prosthetics that seamlessly blended with her own anatomy. The hidden augmentations enabled her to move about freely while she was off-duty, allowing her to pass off as a perfectly happy, healthy young woman. On-duty, she was the Schildmaid: a living interface for the Verteidiger's control systems. The experimental craft was about the same size and shape as a typical European-made TSF, but it was engineered more like a high-altitude mobile carrier. Its advanced technology and intense g-forces required a pilot who could operate far beyond the limits of any ordinary human being.

The only side effect was she had no memory of who she had been prior to the procedure. Welding cybernetic prosthetics to her brain tissue had effectively erased all of her long-term memories from before the operation, leaving only the raw piloting skills she had honed during the decade she spent in simulations. It was a known risk she had consented to prior to the procedure. She had courageously given up part of her own identity for the better of her country.

Or at least, that was the fairy tale her superiors were telling her. They were always so kind to her, so willing to answer her every need in honor of her sacrifice, idolizing her above all of the other girls in her flight team. But something about all of their inspirational stories never quite seemed to add up.

Jo pressed the Replay button again. She paused, zoomed in, and squinted at the static-laced image that had been recorded by the Verteidiger's recon camera the previous day. Maybe it was the computerized portions of her brain that drove her to systematically analyze every piece of evidence. Or maybe it was something more personal.

A female figure climbed out of the wreckage of a downed MiG-21 and waited to be recovered by the rest of her East German squadron. Long blonde hair held in place with a black hairband. A blue and black Fortified Suit with a Captain's insignia. It was a person almost as alien to Jo as the BETA. Yet, somehow, she looked so familiar…

Jo suddenly slipped into one of the waking nightmares that often plagued her. The interlaced video turned into a vivid reality. Now she was the one in the downed MiG, but something was preventing her from climbing out. The blonde-haired girl was a few feet in front of her, standing on the edge of the crumpled fuselage with a pistol pointed at Jo's forehead. There was a cold expression in her eyes, but she seemed deeply saddened. Jo tried to scream, but all that came was the deafening sound of the bullet bursting out of the chamber.

Jo was rocked back to awareness. She was in her barracks in a West German base, sitting in front of a monitor reviewing the Verteidiger's recon footage. She sighed to herself and scratched her head, trying desperately to claw an answer out of the depths of her consciousness. She became so engrossed by the mysterious figure on the screen that she never heard the door slowly opening behind her.

Two of the infiltrators pulled her up from her seat and kept her hooked by the arms. They twisted her around so she faced the rest of the team.

There were four of them, girls around her age all donned in black fatigues. There were the two at her arms, a silver-haired one closer to the door, and one with long pitch black hair at the center of the group. She stood in front of Jo with her arms crossed, her blood red eyes piercing the darkened barracks. Jo's knowledge of the world may have only stretched back a few months, but her strict military education told her she in the presence of Stasi conspirators.

"Hello, Inghild." The dark-haired stranger spoke in a chilling sarcastic tone. "What's it like to come back from the dead?"

"What are you talking about?" Jo said. "Let me go!"

"What's gotten into you?" the woman scolded in return. "What are those filthy Western pigs paying you to keep you as their toy?"

She offered Jo a fake smile as she shook her head.

"You should have known we'd come for you. The Stasi make sure they always have the best technology available. You and that special TSF of yours just showed up on their inventory."

Jo struggled to break free of her captors, clenching teeth as she threw herself forward.

"Calm down, Inghild," the dark woman said jokingly. "We just want to take you back where you belong."

Finally, Jo overpowered them with her quasi-mechanical strength. She charged at the Stasi leader, knocking the wind out of her by plowing her shoulder into the woman's gut. She wrenched the Stasi into a headlock, so that with a small twist of her arms she could break the spy's neck.

A tiny glimpse of panic appeared in the woman's brooding crimson eyes.

" _Psych_ _её_ _!_ " she gasped in Russian. The silver-haired girl moved away from the door. Jo seemed to freeze in place as a strange sensation took hold of her mind.

Jo's composite body made her immune to most conventional sedatives, but her mostly organic brain was still susceptible to the hypnotic powers of Soviet Espers. She felt like her head was quickly heating up until the inside of her skull was ablaze.

Jo released her grip on the Stasi leader and staggered backwards. Violently shaking her head, clawing her fingers through her hair, she tried to put out the imaginary flames inside her mind.

The black-haired woman shouted something else to the Esper. Waves of ice cold water crashed down to put out the fire.

Jo collapsed to the floor, overwhelmed by the sensation of sinking into darkness. She lost consciousness a few seconds later.


	2. Persecution of the Inghilds

" _Switching to instruments only. Out."_

\- Michael Payton, _Viper_

" _This makes no sense."_

\- Gale Boetticher, _Breaking Bad_

* * *

The crumpled hull of the Verteidiger sat in a crater in the ruins of Berlin. The once amazing military marvel had been reduced to a scrap heap, smoke billowing from its damaged armor, fuel and fluids spilling out like opened veins. The crippled TSFs of the Schwarzesmarken team were motionlessly scattered around it like cattle out to slaughter.

 _Too easy_ , Beatrix thought to herself as she surveyed the damage from the air. To think everything would end so quickly, so easily, after dealing with these disgusting rebels for so long. The most entertaining thing was she never even planned on taking down the mighty Verteidiger. She had been a second away from finishing off one of the pathetic members of Schwarzesmarken when the Verteidiger erratically swerved into her sights and took the shot.

Beatrix's grudge against that particular machine cut deep. The Verteidiger's pilot escaped custody and took the experimental craft with her, but that wasn't the worst part of it. She had hijacked a massive cache of Stasi resources on her way out, which she was using to keep the Verteidiger in working condition with minimal underground support. Its mere appearance had become a mockery of everything the Stasi stood for.

Now sweet revenge would belong to Beatrix.

Being incinerated alive in a fiery explosion was always a good death for worthless sub-human scum. Beatrix focused her Aligatori's crosshairs at an exposed fuel pod on the crippled Verteidiger.

* * *

 _Inghiiiiild!_

Jo struggled to regain her senses in the Verteidiger's cockpit. Alarms screamed at her. Her optics filled with flashing alert messages informing her of systems failures in virtually every section of the craft. Gravity pulled on her at an awkward sideways slant, and she could feel heat and smoke gradually rising underneath her.

But Jo couldn't focus on any of those things. All of the urgent sounds were muffled in the back of her head, while the world was drained of most of its color. The thing that sat in the front of her mind was the 30-second-old memory of that girl in the MiG-23—Anett, was that her name?—screaming in despair. The sound of that voice had come through Jo's comms link at the exact moment she had veered in the way of Beatrix's attack.

 _Inghiiiiild!_

The voice looped through her disoriented mind every few seconds. Jo could feel something more and more horrifyingly familiar about it each time.

Why had she done it? Why had she sacrificed everything to protect this one arbitrary pilot? Up until now she had remained on her own side in Berlin's civil war. A few weeks ago, Anett had been making an impassioned plea for Jo to join their team, begging her to remember the life they supposedly lived together. This girl insisted that the two of them had been comrades when the war broke out, and they were best friends before that. Jo ended up turning her back, stoically walking away from the Schwarzesmarken group and toward the vacant Verteidiger in front of her. Behind her, Anett was sobbing uncontrollably. Jo had felt the human half of her heart sinking ever so slightly when she walked away. But even then, she had vowed to remain on the outside.

 _Inghiiiiild!_

The Stasi told her she was a piece of hardware, a mechanical whore designed to lay down for West German propaganda. The Schwarzesmarken insisted she was supposed to be one of them. The only one she could trust was herself. Between the Verteidiger's ruthless West German inventors, the East German Stasi, and the Schwarzesmarken rebelling in the middle, the weapon could easily wind up in the wrong hands on any side.

And yet, all of her cold determination had been thrown aside in one fateful instant. Jo barely had any idea who Anett was, but for that one moment the only instinct in her mind had been to defend her.

 _Defend her._

What was Jo's consciousness trying to tell her?

 _Inghiiiiild!_

Jo started to lose focus as the smell of smoke grew stronger. The prosthetic circuitry that had been implanted throughout her body had been constructed from the same hardware as the Verteidiger's systems. She was dying with her ship.

Suddenly, time shifted in reverse.

 _Inghiiiiild!_

The fire burning through Berlin turned into snow. The bombed out cityscape was replaced with arctic tundra.

The Aligatori firing its rifle at Anett turned into a hidden Destroyer-class charging out of a drift.

 _INGHIIIIILD!_

The voice became more vivid. That hollow, distant sound moved closer so it was like a live feed in Jo's ear.

She remembered.

She dove in front of the Destroyer so she could defend Anett. TSF collided with BETA as Jo absorbed most of the attack with her front fuselage. Sparks flew. Metal screamed and buckled. Bones pulverized. Organs squashed together in ways God never intended.

 _ **INGHIIIILD!**_

Memory stopped. Reality began. Anett was desperately screaming her name on the radio while the dislodged upper portion of her MiG spun wildly through the air. She was breathing her final agonizing breaths even before she crashed back down into the snow.

Her cockpit was open. Irisdina—she knew it was her now—was standing in the collapsed frame pointing the pistol at her. But unlike in all of those nightmares that haunted her, Jo wasn't afraid this time. She didn't try to scream. She would have told Irisdina not to feel guilty, it was okay to pull the trigger, if her vocal chords were still working. She felt… relieved.

She heard the first millisecond of a gunshot.

They say you see a light when you die. They say you should always head toward it, it's there to guide you and comfort you. The light Jo saw was anything but comforting.

A massive surgical lamp blinded her. A circle of masked, silhouetted faces hovered in front of the glare. They might as well have been enemy soldiers looming over her, their heads outlined by the burning interrogation light.

Their distant voices echoed in and out of Jo's consciousness.

"… _only thing we found relatively intact out there. Her squad didn't have enough time to collect the body before the next stampede. The BETA won't eat anything that's been dead for a while."_

They fashioned themselves as miracle workers saving her life, but they were more like soulless grave robbers desecrating her corpse.

And she could feel it. The bones rendered to bloody paste by the Destroyer-class's charge, the wet crater between her eyes where Irisdina had delivered her mercy killing. The surgeons toiled over her to replace everything that had been lost, to bring her back as a different person.

" _Should we allow the Schildmaid to use…_ _ **that**_ _?"_

" _No. It would be far too dangerous to unleash it."_

" _We'll keep the trigger hidden from her neural link. She'll never even know it's there, unless she experiences a brainwave disruption and has to do a manual reconnect."_

" _What kind of disruption would it take?"_

" _She starts to remember who she is."_

* * *

The Verteidiger moved. At first, Beatrix thought it was making one final miserable attempt to take to the air on its rent Jump Units. Then she realized only the upper half of the canopy was rising up, opening on a hinge and creating the illusion that it was growing taller.

She had seen this sort of desperation far too many times before. Jo was going to surrender herself and beg for her life.

Beatrix smirked. She would wait until the idiotic girl climbed out of her cockpit with her arms raised, then execute her personally. It was going to be like shooting traitorous flies off the Wall.

The canopy continued to peel upward, but the cockpit hatch still wasn't visible. The entire front fuselage was now split open like a giant serpent separating its jaw, revealing its damaged internals and expelling a glowing, dark violet vapor—the color of decayed G-elements.

If this were a normal fanfic, the worst thing that would happen was the Alvaaron from Gundam 00 would emerge from the Verteidiger's shell and force Beatrix into a close-range aerial battle.

This was not a normal fanfic.

The Verteidiger's hull divided into a honeycomb pattern. The segments shifted, rolled over one another, and merged. The craft drastically shrank in size as it quickly repaired itself, combining undamaged sections with the parts that had been compromised, and ejecting anything that had been destroyed entirely. It gradually molded into a long, curved shaped that sat close to the ground. The nose of the craft separated to reveal two narrow headlights—like snake's eyes—and a grill lined with armored fangs. The Jump Units moved to the rear and molded into a wide crescent-shaped spoiler. The canopy smoothed over and stretched into a black windshield. The TSF's limbs folded into circles and became chrome wheels. A shadow of the Verteidiger transforming into its new form was cast on the wall of a nearby building, years before the shadow of Yamashiro having her guts beautifully ripped out by the BETA would be cast on a similar wall.

Beatrix was frozen in shock. The incomprehensible _thing_ in front of her looked as if someone had applied the Verteidiger's silver anti-Laser-class coating to a Dodge Pacifica concept car, but even that couldn't be right. This was 1983. The Pacifica wouldn't be revealed for another six years.

What kind of unholy demon-machine had those West German pigs given birth to?

Behind the pitch black windshield, Beatrix could just make out the silhouette of the vehicle's lone driver. In her mind's eye, the windshield dissolved and she could plainly see the visage of a girl who wasn't real—the slightly restructured face, the artificial blue eyes, the surgically dyed freckles, and the pale blonde hair twisted back in those stupid Heidi pigtails: a pinnacle of feminine West German beauty. And hiding behind all the makeup, Beatrix could see Inghild.

A minute ago, the Werewolf Battalion had crushed the Schwarzesmarken-led resistance and ensured victory for the Stasi. Now the battalion was falling into disarray. Some fled. Others waited for Jo to make her next move.

"You know that girl back there?" Katrina said on the radio as her Cheburashka flew past Beatrix. "She reminds me of Bronikowski!"

"And she Eishis like her!" Nicola answered, buzzing Beatrix on the opposite side.

Beatrix wasn't exactly sure what would cause her two subordinates to say those things to each other. Inghild Bronikowski and the walking lie known as "Johanna Achterberg" were the same person. The Stasi's extensive surveillance files had proven this. The entire battalion had been briefed months ago.

The madness was only starting.

More of the Werewolves spontaneously retreated. Those who weren't smart enough to leave with their lives would face the Verteidiger's wrath.

"I can just see the headlines now! 'Disgruntled Ex-Employee Gets Killed in a SWAT Shootout'!" another withdrawing Werewolf shouted over the comms for reasons that would forever remain unexplained.

Rosalinde was one of the few to stay behind. Her Cheburashka began covering the Verteidiger in a hail of machine gun fire. Despite her bravery and determination, she seemed to have succumbed to the same lunacy as everyone else.

"Get out of the car, Astor!" she shouted oddly. "Get out of the car or go to Hell!"

The bullets bounced off the Verteidiger's armor like harmless grains of rice. Something vaguely resembling a TSF's auxiliary arm opened on the side of the transformed craft. The inside barrel began to glow like it were a Laser-class charging its lens.

The resulting attack wasn't an intense beam that instantly vaporized Rosalinde, but instead a condensed ball of lightning that struck her TSF and took all of its systems offline, sparing her life in the progress.

The Verteidiger's tires screamed as it began its race through the besieged streets of Berlin. Every time it made a sharp turn, it launched another glowing orb of static at one of the attacking Werewolves. When the orbs failed, the Verteidiger would fire grappling hooks from the same ports and use the wires to force the Werewolves to crash into each other. And every time it brought down another TSF, it did so in non-lethal fashion. It was almost as if Beatrix were watching an alternate version of Gundam SEED Destiny handled by a production team that actually understood character development and basic coherent story structure. Well, maybe not so much the "coherent" part, but you get the idea.

Jo caught Inga—the Werewolves' special Esper member—on her wires. Inga tried to tear away from the indestructible cables, going as far as hopping her Aligatori to the top of a building with the Verteidiger in tow. Jo remained vigilant, pressing on the brakes to keep Inga from getting too far.

Overwhelmed by the infectious insanity, Inga decided the only way out was to take her own life. Her Aligatori jumped head-first off the side of the building, finally creating enough force to snap free of the Verteidiger's grappling wire. The TSF crumpled like a tin can as soon as it hit the pavement, smearing Inga's soupy remains across the Berlin street.

When Beatrix was watching the live feed, Inga uttered a short fit of maniacal laughter and activated her Prafka just before she made the leap. Replaying the footage, Beatrix thought she heard the Esper girl shout "Don't be late for the party!" a second before splattering into the concrete. Those glowing eyes burned deep into her mind.

All that was left were Beatrix and one other Werewolf, and they were both in the path of the Verteidiger. In anger, Beatrix threw open her comms channel and screamed at the Cheburashka beside her.

"Hohenstein, deal with this traitor!"

There was no response. The Cheburashka simply stood at attention, perfectly functional but perfectly still.

"Open fire, Hohenstein!" Beatrix commanded with even more authority. "She's coming straight for you!"

Opening the video channel, Beatrix saw the hopeless state of her subordinate. Lise was staring at Beatrix through the link, but she acted as if there was nobody there. Her mouth was slightly agape. There was a vacant and strangely innocent look in her eyes. The Verteidiger's madness had completely crushed her mind.

"Mom, dad… what happens now?" Lise said in a small frightened voice.

Jo bypassed Lise and moved straight for Beatrix. In emergency, Beatrix opened the radio frequency that would patch her straight to the Ministry building. She expected to hear the calm and collected voice of Schmidt asking her about the situation in Berlin. Instead he was shouting at the top of his lungs as soon as the channel opened. And what he said was enough to drive Beatrix herself to the brink.

"I want the Viper OFF the streets, once and for all!"

He slammed the channel shut as soon as he finished speaking. Beatrix was alone.

The Verteidiger veered toward the back of Lise's Cheburashka. It accelerated onto the ends of her Jump Units, using her as a ramp and launching itself over the shoulders of her TSF. The vehicle became airborne and flew straight into Beatrix's trajectory.

Beatrix started to raise the Aligatori's shield. The world moved in slow motion as the Verteidiger inched closer and closer and Beatrix braced for impact. Against all rhyme and reason, a bizarre string of words suddenly escaped her mouth.

"You're not going to have me stuffed and mounted!"

An instant before the Verteidiger was in contact range, Beatrix gasped at what she saw in her optics. The vehicle's fangs popped out of its grill like titanium battering rams. When the machines collided, one of the fangs smashed through Beatrix's cockpit door and instantly crushed her ribcage.

Jo and Beatrix went into a freefall together. Impaled on her seat, blood frothing from her mouth, Beatrix could see the Verteidiger's weapons port opening directly in front of her with her bare eyes.

* * *

" _And the outside port houses the Tunneler Missile. It carries an explosive payload. It's unguided, it's basically used to clear obstacles."_

* * *

The missile left the Verteidiger's launcher, traveled forward three feet, and struck the Aligatori's exposed cockpit at point blank range. Major Beatrix Brehme was terminated with extreme prejudice.

* * *

Jo landed her fighter just in front of one of the Schwarzesmarken MiGs, guiding the legs into a kneeling position. Frantically, she climbed out of the Verteidiger's cockpit and rappelled to the ground. It was true that the Verteidiger was armed with an alternate mode Jo had only miraculously discovered at the last minute. It was also true that the craft had expelled high levels of waste material when it was ejecting its damaged components, and she had been cautious to direct the plume away from the disabled Schwarzesmarken team. Everything that happened after that was anyone's guess. The mysterious vapor had driven the Werewolves out of their minds. Jo didn't want to think about what they might have hallucinated.

She quickly found the lever for the MiG-23's external emergency hatch and released the lock. Her greatest fear was to find Anett hopelessly mangled and in indescribable misery, the same way they had found her that day.

Jo ducked down as the door blew open. The frame was still scorching hot and she was petrified of what she might find inside, but she had to see for herself.

Anett was motionless at first. She began to stir as the light washed over her eyelids, and then slowly she looked up. Nothing was broken. There were no signs of internal injury. The only things that made her look worse for wear were a few bruises and a small trickle of blood sliding down her temple.

"Inghild…" She gasped tiredly, squinting in one eye. A weak teasing smile started to form across her mouth. "You should really learn some new skills instead of throwing yourself in the way all the time."

"Anett!" Jo dove into the cockpit with tears in her eyes, wrapping her arms around her friend.

* * *

 _Author's note: Is my credit rating in there? I was thinking about buying a condo._


End file.
